Page 121 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
black. Flickering lamp-light fell on attentive faces as we clung to a
table that would have plunged overboard with all of us if not lashed
to the deck bundles. Each of us had his own lifeline tied to mast-legs
or stays, so as not to disappear in the night waves if an unexpected
breaker should tumble in from the port side.
‘Gherman,’ I shouted across the table to the one who understood
English least. ‘Do you understand what I saw on those Failaka
seals?’
‘Ships.’
‘But ships in every detail like those you and I saw incised on the
canyon walls of Upper Egypt. Similar enough to match like
fingerprints.’
I continued my story. I had told Abdo that we were ourselves
building such a reed-ship in Iraq to test it in the gulf. He was not
surprised. He replied that small boats of this prehistoric type had
been used by Failaka fishermen until our own days. The last of them
had just been abandoned. He had secured it for the museum. It was
the same type as the reed-boats still used in Iraq a few years ago, but
built from bundles of palm-leaf stems, because there were no reeds
on Failaka Island.
‘What about your fingerprints?’ Asbjorn’s smiling face appeared
beside us on the doorsill of the forward cabin. I was slowly getting
to my point.
The boats on the Failaka seals did not merely end in high points
fore and aft, like our ship, or like those on ancient designs of
reed-ships from the Mediterranean islands. On either side of the
pointed bow was a long curved horn. I knew this peculiarity from
reed-ship designs in Egypt and Mesopotamia. On the best represen­
tations they were really shown as animal horns. But on simplified
designs the top of the bow just ended in three tips. I had already
found this curious detail common to ships shown in numerous
Egyptian petroglyphs and on Mesopotamian seals. This symbol
even antedated the invention of man’s first known script. The triple
point on an upeurved bow was the symbol for the word ‘ship’ in the

13. In the shallows of Failaka island three dhows refused to assist; a
Russian lifeboat came to tow us out, but did not succeed until a
ransom was paid to the third dhow which helped the Russians to pull
us out.
14. With both anchors lost we were towed away from Failaka by the
Russian merchantman Slavsk, a hard test for the solidity of a
reed-ship.
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